IS2000 Project Description

TERM PROJECT DESCRIPTION

The term project will consist of the development of a web site to teach the fundamentals of predicate logic and related concepts in formal theory. The class will form individual groups of three to five students, each of which will develop the materials for one part of the site. Some of the basic ideas will be taught in class since I don't expect most students to be familiar with these topics, but you will probably also want or need to do some outside reading in the library or on the web. I will provide a list of general or approximate topics/pieces of the subject for the groups to choose among but groups can alter these topics, and in general will have to decide what approach they are going to take toward a particular topic.

One group will be assigned the task of overall project coordination, which will include things like trying to keep the notation used in the different groups consistent, and trying to make sure that the conceptual "edges" between related groups are smooth. The GSA will be in frequent communication with the coordinating group, as will I.

The site in general, and the individual components, will consist of various types of components and individual groups can emphaize different types of components to different degrees. For instance pages will include text and graphics materials as well as interactive components (written in JavaScript, which you will learn in class) which will enable potential students/users to try out their knowledge in various ways and get feedback on their attempts.

Different groups will emphasize different aspects of this project to different degrees. For instance, some might emphasize teaching per se, and hence emphasize content per se. Others might want to emphasize the technical aspects of building interactive practice components and might have a somewhat narrow scope to the content. Such a site might be thought of as a way to provide interactive practice for a student. Everyone should keep in mind that all features and content should be well motivated and designed to teaching something, rather than just to demonstrate a neat technical aspect of web design.

The group contributions will be evaluated on the following (overlapping) criteria: Although it is not expected that every group will emphasize all of the criteria to the same extent, you should strive for a reasonable level of each, with one or more dimensions that you are particularly outstanding in.

Overall design and appearance of the component, including: transparency of use, ease of navigation, integration with related topics
Subject content: depth, breadth, accuracy, clarity
Technical complexity: especially, the use of interactive tutoring techniques
General creativity, originality etc.

Groups will be required to maintain a detailed log of individual activities and to submit these by the end of the term. If the logs, in my judgement, indicate significantly different levels of effort and/or contributions to the project on the part of the members, I may assign different individual project grades to the members of a group. I don't like having to do that but the fact is that it is not uncommon for some group members to feel that some others haven't put in enough effort or made enough of a contribution to the overall project and it is my responsibility to use my best judgment regarding grades in these situations. These situations, are not common, but neither are they rare. Try to avoid them by making sure that YOU do your share, and by bringing any problems you might have with other members' contributions to their attention as soon as they arise, and to my attention as soon as it is clear that the problem is not being adequately addressed. You should bring any persistent problems to my attention when there is still time to do something constructive about them. I don't mind trying to resolve conflicts when there is time to do something useful about them but I don't like dealing with surprises at the end of the term.

TUTOR TOPICS

Group topics can be defined in a number of ways. They can be defined by the subject per se, or the manner of presentation. That is, a group might want to concentrate on text based explanations, hypertext links and some fairly basic interactive techniqes such as quiz questions with feed back and direction toward explanations. Some questions might involve the student pointing to parts of a diagram etc. Such a project would emphasize the quality of the explanatory text and should cover a reasonable scope of material. On the other extreme, a project might involve concentrating on a relatively sophisticated interactive exercise or game which did not cover a wide range of the topic but involved a significant programming and design effort. An example of this is the tutoring system developed by a student in this class three years ago who built a parser for logical expressions that determined whether the expressions were syntactically valid and, depending on the truth values of the components, whether the expressions were true. (I know most of you are not ready for this but if you are, this is an option.) I expect that most groups will be someplace inbetween. With three to five people in a group you should be able to do some interesting interactive work as well as a good basic textual explanation on many of these topics. Look at the following outlines and give some thought to how much breadth vs. depth you want to focus on.

Overview, Introductory and Background Topics (what is logic, different kinds of logics, nature of proofs, etc.) This can and should be fairly deep.
Propositional Logic

syntax
semantics
truth tables
inference methods

Predicate Logic

Syntax
Sematics
Inference

varibale binding and unification
proof methods (general, in predicate logic form)
conversion to normal forms (e.g., conjunctive normal form)
proof methods (computational efficient methods using normal forms, e.g., proof by refutation)

Explicit examples of the application of logic to reasoning or representation problems. A good example of this is Russell & Norvig's treatment of electronic circuits (in Introduction to Artificial Intelligence). These sorts of examples would suggest interesting interactive techniques. (See the example of circuit design later in the Analytical Engine, though that is just propositional logic.)

Logic based knowledge representation (see an AI text).
Logic representation of the content of natural language statements (These are related but not identical topics).
Logic programming (in general)
Prolog as an implementation of Logic Programming (This could emphasize a detailed description of the Prolog theorum proving algorithm, and/or use of Prolog for knowledge representation, etc....
Advanced Logics (higher order logics, nonmonotonic logics, modal logics, etc... ) This could be an overview of several of these topics, ideas behind them, uses, difficulties, etc. or it could concentrate on just one or two.
Set theory (notation, set operations, venn diagrams, properties (e.g., associativity, commutivity), functions and relations) This is important background for understanding some of the concepts of logic such as the theoretical interpreations of logical semantics.
Other aspects of formal theory such as: (These are not really critical for a logical tutor per se., but they are part of the general fields of formal theory, discrete math. etc., and they are rich places to look for interesting interactive possibilities.)

grammar theory (rewrite rules, levels of grammars and levels of formal languages, basic parsing algorithms)
automata theory

I would like to make this, as close to possible, a coherent overall class effort. If we stay with the idea of an overall introduction to logic, then we should at least cover the first three topics in some form. If the class want to change to overall take and there is more interest in the more advanced topics we could shift the take somewhat in that direction but I would like us to somehow fit the pieces together into a cohensive project. We can talk about this as project proposals come in.

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